ICE pulled the rug out
By Emilie Plunkett
It’s currently 2:13 a.m. on July 7th, and as a rainstorm covers the city of Chicago, I am frantically researching every MFA photo program in the United States.
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On July 6th, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced changes to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) which endangered non-immigrant F1 and M1 visa students. The announcement stated that if one’s current school does not offer in-person classes this fall the visa holder will either have to transfer to another school with in-person classes, or leave the country. Under pre-pandemic policy international students were not allowed to be in the U.S. while taking exclusively online classes. Back in March when schools began to shut down due to COVID-19, ICE made an exception to this rule, stating that this temporary change would be “in effect for the duration of the emergency.” International students were allowed to finish their semester online and, naively I think, most of us assumed that this temporary change would remain in effect until the pandemic was over. Thinking that surely the U.S. government wouldn’t displace over 1 million students, or force them into a highly dangerous situation by being on campus, not in the middle of one of the most intense virus outbreaks in modern history.
ICE and the U.S. government were quickly met with intense backlash, on the same day hundreds of petitions were created to protest these new regulations. There were two petitions that received a lot of circulation on the White House Petition site, several on other platforms, as well as statements coming directly from international student bodies at schools across the nation.
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After the July 6th ICE policy change all attention turned to U.S. colleges, as they stood backed into a tight corner. Most were releasing solidarity statements to international students and stating their plans to offer some form of hybrid education in the fall. The most powerful statements were made by Harvard and MIT, who had already announced plans to be 100% online in the fall. They filed a lawsuit against the United States government in response to ICE’s change in regulations. The lawsuit explained the rash and dangerous nature of this change and how it would put international students, teachers, and college staff at risk of contracting the virus. Per ICE’s statement on the 6th international students would have to prove that they were not solely enrolled in online courses in the fall. Meaning that regardless of the colleges hybrid plans, international students would be expected to be on campus. This was one of the focuses of the lawsuit, the fact that international students would be singled out and would have no choice but to be on campus, regardless of the risk to their health. Harvard and MIT stated in their lawsuit:
By all appearances, ICE’s decision reflects an effort by the federal government to force universities to reopen in-person classes, which would require housing students in densely packed residential halls, notwithstanding the universities’ judgment that it is neither safe nor educationally advisable to do so, and to force such a reopening when neither the students nor the universities have sufficient time to react to or address the additional risks to the health and safety of their communities. The effect—and perhaps even the goal—is to create as much chaos for universities and international students as possible.
Additionally, Harvard and MIT quote ICE in their original statement regarding international students from March that the allowance for online only learning was “in effect for the duration of the emergency.” In the four months since this statement COVID-19 cases in the U.S. had multiplied from 1,100 confirmed cases to 4.5 million currently, yet the July 6th policy change acts in clear opposition to the facts and to their previous commitment.
Within the next few days, after Harvard and MIT filed their lawsuit against ICE, other top universities from 17 states and the District of Columbia, joined the lawsuit. It was obvious that this policy change had been seen for what it was - an action that would threaten not only the lives of students and staff at universities but also the communities surrounding them, while acting as a mechanism of the anti-immigration agenda the Trump administration has been carrying out since the very beginning. It was about ignoring the virus and valuing capital over lives. Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel which provides legal aid to foreign graduate students, said to the New York Times. “The president is using foreign students as pawns to keep all schools open, no matter the cost to the health and well-being of these students and their communities,”
If we look at this policy change from the perspective of a capitalist hungry society, that puts empathy and community at the bottom of the priority list, deporting international students would inherently damage the economy. International students pay the highest tuition, making them integral to the continued survival of academic institutions, especially amidst the current economic crisis. If these students were deported en masse, many of them would drop out leading to an even more dramatic shortfall in tuition. This made the targeting of international students an excellent lever to force more schools to reopen campuses.
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In response to the lawsuit and general backlash from the U.S. community, ICE released a new statement less than 10 days after. On July 14th the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE rescinded the July 6th policy change. This was released by District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs who stated that it only took five minutes for DHS and ICE to agree to the resolution. This backflip was met with an enormous sigh of relief from international students and college administrators. Students were no longer stuck in limbo, fearing deportation and relocation. This “near-miss” still left international students feeling unsafe, and many are considering alternative options - either returning home or heading to other more welcoming and politically stable nations.
The latest update on July 24th, states that incoming first-year international undergraduate and graduate students for 2020-2021 will not be allowed in the U.S. to begin their studies if their courses are all online. These incoming freshmen will have to quickly find alternate programs, postpone their studies, or take classes online from their home country, where issues such as access to quality computers, WIFI and other technologies, as well as language barriers and time zones quickly complicate the situation.
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I want to recognise my privilege in this situation. I am an international student, but I am a white Australian whose country's relationship with the United States is not affected by the President’s xenophobia and bigotry. I was not experiencing discrimination because of my country’s culture, religious beliefs or race. Instead I was a small piece of a much larger objective by the U.S. government to isolate America from the rest of the world, and burn any foreign relationship to the ground. Australia is a member of white western ideology, it is a part of the English Commonwealth and is technically still a colony of the United Kingdom. It’s history is not dissimilar to that of the United States regarding their treatment of Indigenous peoples and all those who do not descend from white Anglo-Saxon Europeans. My country is not perceived as an enemy of the United States. It is not seen as an enemy of American culture. I receive remarks like “shrimp on the barbie'' and “g’day!” when I tell someone where I’m from, instead of experiencing macro and micro aggressions that take the form of racial slurs, threats and acts of physical violence. My experience of this policy change by ICE is inherently different from that of BIPOC’s.
A few days before July 6th a friend of mine in Chicago had asked me why I was attending college in the U.S. With everything that’s happened under the Trump administration, he wanted to know why I had chosen to be here. At that time I had a concrete answer - I knew that the life I had built for myself here over the past two years, the people in it, and the education I’m receiving, was worth the complex uncertainty that is living on a visa. My answer now is less absolute. It was an othering experience to learn about ICE’s policy change, and it left me feeling completely powerless and alone. I began to question if I really felt welcome anymore. For that week I didn’t, not for a second. I felt like I was in the U.S. on borrowed time, that the life I had built for myself was about to expire.
Between the 6th and the 14th I had come up with about eight different backup plans, each one slightly more complicated and elaborate. I still have a four-page word document on my desktop that lists every MFA Photo program in the United States, organised by whether or not they’ve made a statement about in-person classes for the fall.
It was scary how fast I was willing to risk my health to go on campus so that I could stay. So quickly my anxiety about being in a classroom with who knows how many people was gone. I don’t think I could connect to that threat and the threat of deportation at the same time. I was willing to sacrifice everything to protect my life in America. An experience many immigrants in this country face on a daily basis.
The current state of the world has us all at a resting depressive state, but those few days in July were truly the worst my mental health has ever been. I felt overwhelmed with uncertainty and completely disconnected from my life. With everything that is happening globally, mental health must be the priority. International students experienced a week of intense anxiety and instability that damaged their mental wellbeing. We, as a community experiencing different types of hardship in the pandemic, need to prioritize our mental health now more than ever.
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To end the month of July the Trump administration announced another policy change that creates a similar sense of fear and instability. The government is undertaking a review of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that will allow Dreamers to renew their status and defer deportation for only one year, rather than two. Leaving Dreamers with an incredible amount of uncertainty amidst the pandemic. The experience of international students and DACA recipients is inherently very different, affected by socio-economic status, country history, and political climate, among other things. However these acts by the government serve the same purpose, to divide America further and perpetuate isolationism.
The decision to threaten international students with deportation amidst a pandemic was a political act to continue the spread of xenophobic ideology and perpetuate instability. This policy change, and reversal, affected millions of international students living across the U.S., leaving many still uncertain about their place in America - a country currently acting as their home. It’s important to recognise all the different ways this pandemic has unraveled our lives.
We are all still struggling to adjust to this way of living, overcoming hardship after hardship. Now more than ever we have to prioritize community, understanding, and empathy so that we as a species can survive this pandemic. We need to use our voices and continue to be activists. We need to share our experiences with each other and use vulnerability as a radical act.
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Resources:
Visa Policy Change
Trump Visa Rules Seen as Way to Pressure Colleges on Reopening
More Than 200 Schools Back Harvard/MIT Lawsuit Over Foreign Student Rule
Trump administration backs off plan requiring international students to take face-to-face classes
International Student Advocacy Resource List
Race & Australia
Timeline of Racism in Australia, 1900s
‘We know the pain’: Australia confronts police racism towards first inhabitants
Colleges and Reopening Plans